Flaming Lips

The music of the Flaming Lips (Wayne Coyne on vocals, Mike Ivins on bass, Richard English on drums) has been compared to cartoon art: crude yet recognizable forms, a landscape of stereotypes, a parodic register, a narrative proceeding through simplifications to the point of the implausible. The Flaming Lips applied all this to psychedelic rock in a practice not so far removed from that of the most creative of all freaks, Frank Zappa.

By blending ideas from sources as diverse as Miles Davis, the Butthole Surfers, Jesus And Mary Chain, and the Beach Boys, their sound became a semiotic cauldron of �signs� from popular musical culture that transcends the original neo-psychedelic premise.

On their early records, Coyne displayed a histrionic personality, borrowing the �cursed� talking-blues style of Lou Reed and the possessed recitation of Jim Morrison. English�s galactic drumming, a worthy heir to Keith Moon and John Bonham, provides the perfect backdrop for the leader�s vain guitar flourishes.

The debut EP (LSD, 1984), with the explosive and distorted My Own Planet setting an epic pace, the distorted voodoobilly of Bag Full Of Thoughts driving a drunken student-style dance, and the long �trip� of Scratching The Door paying homage to early Pink Floyd, immediately revealed the anticonformist, anarchic genius underlying their music.

The album Hear It Is (Pink Dust, 1986) already contained in nuce their entire repertoire. She Is Death again drew on the psychedelic pieces of early Pink Floyd. With You inaugurated a style they would perfect and exploit to exhaustion: a crescendo ballad form derived from the Velvet Underground�s most morbid trenodies and Syd Barrett�s sleepwalking soliloquies. Unplugged cleverly inserted a domesticated ferocity into the country squares, rockabilly, and punk-rock, which Just Like Before injected into the abrasive rock�n�roll of the Stooges (with a riff echoing the Kinks� You Really Got Me), and which Man From Pakistan transformed into a compelling, perverse, subversive garage-rock charge.
A more �roots,� traditional vein, which would soon be exhausted, was represented by peripheral but catchy episodes like Trains Brains & Rain, a pub-style choral anthem reminiscent of the Mekons.
The album�s climax was the long (seven-minute), melodramatic Jesus Shootin� Heroin, a kind of heroin-addict nightmare that borrows the light boogie rhythm from Lou Reed, guitar neurosis from Neil Young, and melodramatic recitation from Jim Morrison.

The flow of Oh My Gawd (Restless, 1987), with its alternation of �hard� moments and softer ones, mirrors that of the previous Hear It Is. Among the former is immediately the blazing anthem Everything�s Exploding, which combines the violent racket of the Stooges with the titanic anxiety of the Animals. Then comes Prescription Love (a long instrumental introduction reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd at double speed, followed by a feverish rockabilly chorus with Cramps-style distorted guitar). In Can�t Stop The Spring, a hypnotic guitar riff is obsessively repeated, propping up a circus-like Kinks-style melody.
Among the softer moments�early demonstrations of the melodic talent of singer and guitarist�are Thanks to You, with a feverish guitar echoing the Who of Tommy; Can�t Exist, a tender psychedelic lullaby; and the long piano ballad Love Yer Brain, which disintegrates toward the end into muffled thuds and noise.
The Flaming Lips attempt, for the first time, an extended jam, but more than a jam, One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond (nine minutes) is a psychodrama that crosses the Pink Floyd of More with the Steppenwolf of Magic Carpet Ride. Overall, it is the weak point of the album, which would otherwise be a masterpiece.
The most �lysergic� tracks (disjointed, stretched, full of sound effects) are Maximum Dream and, above all, the grand lysergic finale The Ceiling Is Bending.
The album was especially appreciated by pundits who had frowned at the clowning of Hear It Is and had hoped for greater seriousness.

Telepathic Surgery (Restless, 1989), on the other hand, is the album in which the band�s personality is definitively clarified, having until then hovered in the limbo of the 1960s. First of all, Coyne recovers and accentuates his sarcastic humor, irreverent nature, and cartoon-like approach (the gags of Hari-Krishna Stomp Wagon and Redneck School Of Technology, worthy of the Bonzo Band). Then the arsenal of tricks expands enormously: there are truly endless fragments glued together in the studio. Finally, the darkest side of their art triumphs�the side that connects more to the raw, wild space-rock of Hawkwind and the underground rock of the era than to the grandiose rock operas of the Who or the cathedral-like suites of Pink Floyd. While representing their technical and compositional peak, this album is also the most authentic expression of the band�s rebellious, working-class spirit. This is evident from the start in Drug Machine In Heaven, but even more so in Fryin� Up, propelled by the riff from Born To Be Wild. The references take on the value of postmodern discourse: Right Now, which manages to merge the pulse and scream of Interstellar Overdrive with the cadence of My Generation, and Chrome Plated Suicide, with Coyne skillfully blending two famous �arias,� Blowing In The Wind and Tommy, into a single chorus.
The monumental Hell�s Angel�s Cracker Factory (present only on the CD version of the album) is one of the tracks that aspires to the title of greatest masterpiece of the �80s. Hell�s is a mosaic suite in the true spirit of the 1960s�the most transgressive years of the Fugs� Virgin Forest and early Frank Zappa.

In A Priest Driven Ambulance (Restless, 1990) presents the first changes in the lineup: the decade�s most �wacky� trio is joined by guitarist John Donahue (also of Mercury Rev), who seems to immediately grasp the madness of his bandmates from the very first chords. Meanwhile, English has left music, tired of concerts and recording sessions; Nathan Roberts takes his place. This is the album where the Flaming Lips� psychedelic rock begins to evolve into something else�less eccentric and chaotic, more linear and compact.
The opening track, Shine On Sweet Jesus, is textbook, with furious Chrome-style distortions, a hammering �tracked� cadence, and a psychedelic beat chorus worthy of Syd Barrett, all flavored with a humorous low-and-falsetto vocal chorus reminiscent of �50s vocal groups.
In the Barrett-Hitchcock line, which is the soul of much of this work, Unconsciously Screamin� is the most lysergic track, both for Coyne�s spacey chorus and the torrential �acid� bursts of guitar. Here, as elsewhere, the debt to the catastrophic instrumental codas of the Who is evident. Barrett�s specter is even more vivid in the surreal, fairy-tale ballad Rainin� Babies, always punctuated by feedback bursts but in a tone of celestial madness.
Increasingly characteristic is the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde alternation of acoustic and electric sounds. In the first style, Coyne displays the intimacy of Five Stop Mother Superior Rain, brushing against the early folk-singer Dylan in the depressed lament of Stand In Line. Mr. Hyde emerges in God Walks Among Us, picking up where Shine On Sweet Jesus left off with another maelstrom of tribal rhythms and manic inserts, psychedelic filtered-vocal choruses, and electric guitar bursts.
The guitar effects are often dizzying, thanks also to producer Dave Fridmann, who plays bass in Mercury Rev. Fridmann displays in the studio a rare, unleashed imagination as a �director,� and his manipulation work leaves a defining mark on the album, giving the listener no respite. Mountain Side is their instrumental satori.
Less �encyclopedic� than previous albums (in that the references are fewer and less overt), less influenced by two-chord punk and sonic-garage rock, yet still in line with the B-movie (sci-fi/horror) soundtrack philosophy, In A Priest Driven Ambulance suffers only from the absence of a key track. If the album ranks below Hear It Is and Telepathic Surgery (the CD), at least two �Jesus songs,� God Walks Among Us and Shine On Sweet Jesus, as well as Unconsciously Screamin�, will enter the repertoire.

With Hit To Death In The Future Head (Warner Brothers, 1992), a confused and unresolved album, the band mainly attempts to reach a wider audience, as evident in the poppier tracks: Everyone Wants To Live Forever is brisk and punchy like their best rock�n�roll numbers, but the show-stealer is the chorus�one of the catchiest in their career; Halloween On the Barbary Coast, its counterpart on the other side, has an even more immediate guitar riff and a somewhat raga-like groove. Other memorable melodies surface in the folk-rock march of Hit It and the Kinks-style melodic vignette (with the surreal touch of early Pink Floyd) of Gingerale Afternoon. The peak of the album�s mannerism is Frogs, which transforms a zany nursery rhyme and a off-key music box into a chaotic, absurdist melee. The tracks are, as always, filled with humorous �gags,� but overall the tone is more serious and determined than before: these are songs for large arenas, not �trips� in basements. There is a compositional disorder that is too composed.
Almost all the melodic tracks repeat the same structure: psychedelic rounds led by dry timbres and shrill fuzz guitar, reinforced by spacey falsetto choruses and baroque trumpets, and above all afflicted by chronic infantilism.
Counterbalancing these naive choruses are the more �lysergic� tracks, which immerse in a soft, languid sound in which one can recognize the influence of CSN&Y vocal harmonies and the bucolic folk of the White Album (The Sun). Thus, the album�s atmospheric apex is the delicate, dissonance-laden prayer that closes the work, Hold Your Head.
In the baroque line of Oh My Gawd, and therefore far from the gory, iconoclastic, and creative sound of other albums, Hit To Death seals the band�s technical (if not artistic) maturation. The guitar, in particular, has never been so clear and precise in its interventions. Coyne himself has improved both as a songwriter and a singer. As a songwriter, he manages to craft very serious and refined lyrics. As a singer, he resurrects the prophetic, desperate register of Westerberg, in which many �80s teenagers left their hearts. Frogs, Everyone Wants To Live Forever, and Gingerale Afternoon are the new classics.

Coyne�s philosophy is that of a modern poet of uncultured provincial alienation, not that of an old poet of metropolitan, cultivated alienation. Their intellectual level is well represented by lyrics like "You're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't," worthy of a rough Midwest trucker and certainly not of snobbish intellectuals � la Andy Warhol. Coyne doesn�t have many topics to discuss: life, death, love. His universe ends there. His universe is by no means dark or sinister, but simply distorted into a grand circus of the absurd.

The turbulent phase, however, is not over: Roberts (who got married) is replaced by multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, and Donahue (who embarked on a solo career) by Ronald Jones. Transmissions From The Satellite Heart (Warner Brothers, 1993) confirms Ivins and Coyne�s talent for writing catchy choruses and immersing them in a sea of sound effects; but in this music, psychedelia is no longer a pretext to assemble cartoons, a metaphor to make surreal documentaries�it is reduced to its bare essentials, a simple sound, in the tradition of early Pink Floyd and Sgt. Pepper.
Most of the time, Coyne retreats into a dreamy, slightly melancholic chant; this is the case with Turn It On, Superhumans, Chewin' On The Apple Of Your Eye, even with arrangements ranging from acoustic to classical. A couple of psychedelic fanfares (festive arrangements, village-band rhythms, beat melodies, cascading effects) like Pilot At The Can Of God and Be My Head do not stray far from this mid-range tone. Towering above all is the surreal gag of She Don�t Use Jelly, which is a manual of how the Flaming Lips compose memorable songs: a nursery rhyme, a music box, and a march (and a theme borrowed from others, in this case the Rolling Stones� You Can�t Always Get What You Want). Coyne has discovered that his syrupy, narcotic register has the same suggestive power as Roger Waters�, and therefore he can �sell� his trance-ballads even in sophisticated drawing rooms.
To connoisseurs, the Oklahoma boys still offer three gems: Moth In The Incubator, a riot where effects overflow and take over, unleashing a psychedelic carousel in crescendo; the martial delirium of Oh My Pregnant Head in a flood of reverb and fuzz; and the finale of Vegetables, when Coyne sinks into another of his catatonic crises, but this time the whole thing (military-style drumming, languid acoustic guitar moans, fragile xylophone chimes, martial distortions of electric guitar) is truly demented.

Everywhere, the meticulous care with which these tracks were arranged triumphs. This is, in fact, the Dark Side Of The Moon of the Flaming Lips, where the band transforms a sound forged through years of experimentation (that collage-style layering of references and noises) into a trademark, a logo, a brand.

The Flaming Lips had to wait months before the classic composure of Transmissions penetrated the nervous system of the masses, but in the end they enjoyed the satisfaction of hearing their songs on the most commercial radio stations.

Clouds Taste Metallic (Warner Brothers, 1995) follows the same principles of the elaborate ballad, balanced between Coyne's dreamy, vulnerable lament and a whimsical circus of sound effects. This gives rise to the solemn The Abandoned Hospital Ship and They Punctured My Yolk, though we've already heard them in slightly different forms on previous albums. Occasionally (Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles) the "astronomical" chord progressions of the early Pink Floyd resurface; sometimes a more lively nursery-rhyme rhythm (Kim's Watermelon Gun) breaks the general torpor; and the march of Bad Days (which borrows its chorus from a 1963 hit, I Will Follow Him) hits on the most improbable arrangement�but these are just isolated moments. The She Don't Use Jelly of this album is Brainville, a quirky country-vaudeville tune to sing in chorus. The usual surreal lyrics (featuring brains, giraffes, molecules, and watermelon-shaped guns) uphold the myth, but the psychedelic frenzies that once made them famous have now faded. The Lips compensate with studio craft, polish, and first-class collage work. The somewhat forced burlesque of This Here Giraffe, Christmas At The Zoo, and Guy Who Got A Headache And Accidentally Saves The World, however, feels a bit patchy, revealing a very tired band.

The trajectory of the Flaming Lips can be summarized as follows: an initial period (the first album and Hear It Is) still in the garage-rock limbo; the explosion of an almost baroque psychedelic verve in Oh My Gawd; the rationalization of that ideology in the postmodern canon of Telepathic Surgery; In A Priest Driven Ambulance marks the peak of schizophrenia, with the soul torn between the early garage-rock and the elaborate harmonies of maturity; Hit To Death In The Future Head uses that schizophrenia to experiment with form; Transmissions From The Satellite Heart adopts that form as dogma and shapes it into Neil Young-style ballads.

Somehow the band managed to convince their label to release Zaireeka (Warner Brothers, 1997), a set of four CDs to be played simultaneously on four different CD players (never mind that nobody owns four CD players), an experiment reminiscent of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen.

Coyne is the mind behind these bizarre experiments. The next one was a concert for boom boxes, held on May 16, 1998 in London. Coyne conducted an orchestra of 40 boom boxes played by rock luminaries such as Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Tim Gane (Stereolab), Martin Carr (Boo Radleys ), Miki Berenyi (Lush). Each boom box plays a song composed by the Flaming Lips and Coyne instructs the players on when and how to play it.

A Collection Of Songs Representing (Restless, 1999) is a compilation of their early years.

Coyne kept surprising his audience, critics and label by following up his most experimental work with a best-seller. On The Soft Bulletin (Warner Brothers, 1999) the Flaming Lips are a trio: Coyne, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd and bassist Michael Ivins. The album was born during the sessions of Zaireeka but it underwent tormented surgery to reflect a number of personal tragedies that scarred the members of the group. The resulting work is a highly sophisticated collage of sounds that thrusts drums upfront and all but eliminates guitars. The songs are the most melodic and straightforward of their career, veritable parodies of commercial pop, except that each one is a clockwork of subtly displaced arrangements. This may actually be the first album since Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks to seriously change the concept of orchestral pop. Their method has something in common with Lindsey Buckingham's eccentric and manically layered scores (Fleetwood Mac), but theirs is far more orchestral. All of Coyne's avantgarde experiments seem to converge in the vision embraced by this album.
Their postmodernist revision of orchestral pop is, inevitably, also satire, a parody of spy-movie soundtracks, Disney cartoons and sentimental musicals.
In tracks like Race For The Prize (the most radio-friendly of the lot, because it's the closest to Vaseline), Waitin' For A Superman (a close second, on account of a Beatles similarity), Buggin' (the catchiest tune, Merseybeat vocal harmonies, pounding drums), The Spiderbite Song (a tragic piano theme and a circus-like march), and Feeling Yourself Disintegrate (the most languidly psychedelic of the batch) keyboards, strings, horns and rhythm run amok and Coyne's twisted melodic talent is in full display. The trio's arrangements know no borders, and could drift much further, as hinted by the instrumentals The Observer and Sleeping On The Roof.
The opera is a better reference point for pastoral interludes such as A Spoonful Weights A Ton (velvet strings, caressing harps, celestial flutes). But the cartoon has remained, throughout the years, the Flaming Lips' favorite art. The pomp of The Gash (including a Queen-like choir) is grotesque the same way so many cartoon characters are.
"Genre overload" sinks puzzles like The Spark That Bled, which piles up sonic paraphernalia of soul, country, funk, classical music without a unifying theme.
Gone are the silly gags that made them famous after they abandoned the purely musical approach of the early years. The Flaming Lips have grown up and are returning to music for the sake of music, but with different ears. The word "collage" applies to both their early suites and to these shorter songs, but it means two different things.
Coyne the dadaistic conductor has created his own version of symphonic music, the same way Zappa did. Coyne has too many ideas and has trouble squeezing them into just one piece, so he writes songs. Now if he could only find a way to stretch them to match one of his early suites, he would become one of the century's most intriguing composers.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Warner Bros, 2002), a sci-fi concept album (ironically dedicated to Boredom's drummer), is, like, all Flaming Lips albums, a post-modernist essay. This time Coyne delves into the age of videogames. The lush, smooth, caressing sound of Soft Bulletin is applied to a different domain, but through the same distorting lenses. Given the target, it is not surprising that the songs embrace digital glitches, falsetto choruses, and restless dynamics (most restless in Yoshimi Part 2, Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell and the instrumental merry-go-round of Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon). Coyne can take any material and any premise and turn them into his trademark sound, the sound of a relaxed T.V. spectator watching the craziest show. Fight Test, Are You a Hypnotist, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots - Part 1, It's Summertime and especially Funeral In My Head are so perfectly "Flaming Lips-ian" that they seem manufactured in assembly line. On the downside, Coyne is ever closer to the mainstream pop ballad with One More Robot, Do You Realize (two more classics), All We Have Is Now, In the Morning of Magicians.

Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid (Restless, 2002) collects the first five albums and assorted rarities.

The EP Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell (Warner, 2003) features the catchy Assassination Of The Sun, the instrumental I'm A Fly In A Sunbeam and some awful dance remixes.

Late Night Tales (Azuli, 2005) is simply a (rather lame) collection of Flaming Lips' favorite songs by other artists.

Neither the riffs nor the melodies of At War With The Mystics (Warner, 2006) are particularly exciting. During lengthy periods of faceless songs, the band sounds like a side project by Burt Bacharach or Prince (Free Radicals). Only The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song and The W.A.N.D display some fire, but the verve is quickly dispelled by icy arrangements worthy of a mummy and by lyrics that couldn't be more tedious. If the goal was to make people miss Yoshimi, they succeeded.

At War With The Mystics 5.1 (Warner, 2006) contains a surround-sound version of the record, five outtakes, eight rare tracks and three videos.

The soundtrack for their first film, Christmas On Mars (Warner Bros, 2008), titled Once Beyond Hopelessness in the vinyl version, contained more interesting ideas than their previous five albums, but none of those ideas was fully developed.

If one could remove the obnoxious filler, Embryonic (Reprise, 2009) would be one of the Flaming Lips' trickiest albums. However, given the chronic inability of the vocalist to do more than recite, and given the dearth of hummable refrains, most of the charm is due to the production and the arrangements that simply remix enough elements to create an exhilarating experience: Convinced Of The Hex blends hyper-syncopated beat, ska guitar and robotic vocals; The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine melds industrial pow-wow rhythm, oneiric vibraphone and loose guitar tones; etc. The core of the album is basically a parade of slanted rhythms, incoherent guitars and sluggish vocals (Your Bats that peaks with the seven-minute deconstructed raga Powerless. With the exception of the brief free-jazz bacchanal of Aquarius Sabotage, the booming blues-rock of Worm Mountain, and the surprising imitation of Suicide's neurotic rock'n'roll in Silver Trembling Hands, these songs don't display the slightest sign of passion. In fact, the slow-motion otherworldly elegies Evil and If and the evanescent The Ego's Last Stand (that represent the exact opposite of passion) stand out as the most intriguing moments. There are few of their trademark catchy hooks: the childish ditty I Can Be A Frog is thoroughly disposable, although the skewed, lush, anthemic Watching the Planets was indeed captivating. But the latter hardly seemed to belong to this collection of shapeless songs.

The band also composed the six-hour song I Found a Star on the Ground (2011) for a stroboscope-based toy, as well as the 24-hour song 7 Skies H3 (2011), released on Halloween day as a flash drive encased in a real human skull (later released as a 50-minute 10-song album). The following year they recorded their version of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King.

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (2012) collects collaborations with Nick Cave, Neon Indian, Yoko Ono, Prefuse 73, Erykah Badu (wasted on a lengthy Roberta Flack cover), Biz Markie, Bon Iver, Lightning Bolt, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Ke$ha, Chris Martin of Coldplay, etc orginally released on limited-edition EPs. The highlights are the ghostly singsong I Don't Want You to Die with Chris Martin, Ashes in the Air with Bon Iver, and I'm Working at NASA on Acid with Lightning Bolt.

The word "repetitive" doesn't even close to describing Terror (Warner, 2013), the most understated and bleakest album of their career, a post-apocalyptic Pink Floyd-ian concept of sorts. Most songs are slow, frail, spaced-out chants with minimal arrangements. If you think that Look The Sun Is Rising is feeble, wait until you hear Be Free A Way, which is simply a whispered lullaby, and that is substantive compared with You Are Alone, which is not even a whisper lost in pure (electronic) atmosphere. Nonetheless, one of these psalms, Try To Explain, manages to sound touching and humane. It is, however, clearly indebted to Pink Floyd, a relationship that is even more evident in the 13-minute You Lust, opened by a clock-like effect a` la Time and by a Welcome to the Machine-like sci-fi effect. The comparison ends there, as the next ten minutes are taken up by a lifeless litany coupled with a shamanic pow-wow dance (best rhythm of this rhythm-starved album) and then implode in a Buddhist-like invocation. There is an art of how to be harrowing while being ethereal, and that art peaks with Butterfly How Long It Takes To Die: a vortex of electronic fluff, funk guitar tones, the faintest of vocals. At the other end of the spectrum is a relatively lively piece like The Terror, set in motion by a machine's pulsation and a distorted airport-like announcement, before gliding on a fast beat and celestial drones. Far from being an optimistic relapse, this song (that contains the iconic lyrics "we don't control the controls") ends in jarring dissonance and a funereal murmur. It marks the second peak of pathos of the album (with Try To Explain) and also its melodic peak. Roger Waters, not Nietzsche or Sartre, is the towering philosophical inspiration for this psychoanalytical exercise in self-depression. The biggest drawback of the concept is the lack of a "punch line": the closing song, Always There In Our Hearts is probably the lamest of the entire album, instead of being the final apotheosis or the final implosion or the final "something else". The album is unfinished for the same reason that none of the songs stand out: very deep feelings, access to a high-tech studio, but limited artistic inspiration. By now, Flaming Lips were mostly an electronic outfit, largely reliant on multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd.

After the EP Peace Sword (2013), the band decided to pay tribute to the Beatles' most famous album and turned it into With a Little Help From My Fwends (2014). This was a collaboration with ubiquitous and obnoxious pop singer, TV star and Hollywood actress Miley Cyrus, whose album Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (2015) was influenced by the experience. It followed her best-selling Meet Miley Cyrus (2007), Breakout (2008), Can't Be Tamed (2010), and Bangerz (2013), and would be followed by Younger Now (2017) and She Is Coming (2019).

Lightning Strikes the Postman (Warner Bros, 2016) is an alternate mix of Clouds Taste Metallic.

Heady Nuggs Vol.II Studio Albums 2006 - 2012 is an 8-LP box-set containing At War With The Mystics, Christmas On Mars, Embryonic, The Dark Side Of The Moon and The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.

Atlas Eets Christmas (2014) is a mostly instrumental Christmas album, another of their eccentric conceptual acts. Their career was increasingly about their antics not about the actual songs. In hindsight, most of their career can be viewed as performance art rather than music.

Unfortunately, they tried to make a real album and the result was Oczy Mlody (2017), a boring parade of cartoonish electronic music, closing with another obnoxious collaboration with Miley Cyrus, We a Family. Perhaps the album was meant as a follow-up to Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz.

The rock opera King's Mouth - Music and Songs (2019), narrated by Mick Jones of the Clash, was originally meant as the soundtrack to an art installation by Wayne Coyne.

Dead Lips (2020) was a collaboration between Los Angeles-based duo Deap Vally and two members of the Flaming Lips, vocalist Wayne Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd.